Three K-Dramas Premiere at BIFF Before They Hit Netflix and Disney+
The Busan International Film Festival's On Screen section is three Korean series this year, and all three are world premieres. The 31st edition runs October 6 to 15 around the Busan Cinema Center in Haeundae.
The one worth doing arithmetic over is The Remarried Empress. Disney+ confirmed November 4 as its streaming date, and Busan screens it in early October. Roughly a month of lead time. The teaser passed ten million views soon after it went up.
The three
꿀알바, which Netflix announced under the working English title Perfect Job, is the mystery-horror one. Netflix's own announcement has Kim Da-min directing and Lee Jae-wook as a young man buried in debt who walks into an employment agency advertising wages fifty times the going hourly rate. Go Min-si plays a labour safety investigator, Kim Min-ha his sister, Lee Hee-joon the agency owner.
재혼 황후, The Remarried Empress, is the Disney+ one and the biggest of the three by a distance. Jo Soo-won directs. Shin Min-a is Empress Navier of the Eastern Empire, Ju Ji-hoon the emperor who throws her over for Rashta, an escaped slave played by Lee Se-young, and Lee Jong-suk the Western prince Navier asks permission to marry instead. The webtoon it comes from had 2.97 billion cumulative global views as of July 2026.
푸른길, Blue Road, went into production at Netflix under the working title 로드. Han Jun-hee directs and co-writes. Son Suk-ku and Nagayama Eita play a Korean and a Japanese detective chasing the same cross-border murders, with Kim Shin-rok, Choi Sung-eun and Jung Jae-young alongside them. Korean Wikipedia lists it as eight episodes, fourth quarter of 2026.
One name shows up twice on a three-title list. Han Jun-hee directs Blue Road, and Netflix's Perfect Job announcement credits him as that project's overall planner. Scheduling coincidence, probably. Worth noticing anyway.
Neither Netflix announcement carries a release date. I opened both, the April 2025 Perfect Job page and the September 2025 Road page, and the date line is not there.
The round you want is September 21
BIFF splits booking into two openings. The festival's Korean ticket page puts the first at 2pm KST on September 17, covering the opening and closing ceremonies, Open Cinema, Midnight Passion, Actors' House and Community BIFF. The second opens at 2pm KST on Monday, September 21, and covers general screenings, Master Class and Cine Class.
On Screen is not named in the first list. BIFF does not spell the point out anywhere on that page either. The only slot left for the three series is the September 21 round.
Two o'clock in Seoul is 05:00 UTC, 1am on the US East Coast, 6am in the UK, 10pm on the 20th in California.
A general screening is ₩10,000. The ceremonies are ₩30,000, Midnight Passion ₩20,000, Actors' House and Master Class ₩15,000. Those ceremony seats went in Thursday's first round. The opening ceremony on October 6 screens Kim Jong-kwan's 낮과 밤은 서로에게. General seats sell online only, capped at two tickets per screening code, and the same rundown puts the festival across eight cinemas and 31 screens. At the won's September 17 close of 1,382.2 to the dollar, ₩10,000 comes to about $7.20.
Two more things sit on the same Korean page. Anyone 65 or over, registered disabled, or a national merit recipient takes ₩3,000 off a ticket on production of documentation. Cancellation is free until six days before a screening, and after that the fee runs ₩1,000 to ₩9,000 depending on which ticket it is and how late you drop it. Dropping a ₩10,000 seat a week out costs nothing at all.
The English page still says coming soon
You get the full schedule, the prices and the discount categories on BIFF's Korean ticket page. The English version of the same page serves a "coming soon" graphic where that information should be, and points you at the call centre on 1666-9177, open 10:00 to 17:00 KST on weekdays, shut between 12:00 and 13:30.
So read the Korean page. The booking system itself lives at ticket.biff.kr, and you will want the account and a saved payment method sorted before 2pm Monday rather than during it. I have not tested a foreign card on BIFF's system and will not tell you it works.
Everything else is competing for that same 2pm slot. Star News's write-up of the September 1 press conference puts the official selection at 246 films from 59 countries, 95 of them world premieres, out of 315 films shown across the ten days. That report also notes BIFF's new A-list standing alongside Cannes, Berlin and Venice, and English Wikipedia's festival page has Zhang Yimou heading the seven-member Competition jury.
If you cannot get to Busan, none of this is lost. The Remarried Empress arrives on Disney+ on November 4, and the two Netflix titles land whenever Netflix decides to say so. Busan buys you a month, a cinema screen and an audience, for the price of two coffees.
I want to hear from anyone who actually lands an On Screen ticket on Monday. Which of the three did you pick, and how fast did it go?
This is a running news series, not a one-off post — new stories go up twice a day, roughly 7am and 7pm Korea time.
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